News – Disney Announces Their First Animated Marvel Movie, 5/9/13

Back in 2009, Disney made the bold move of buying up Marvel Comics. Apocalyptic prophecies surfaced, predicting the Fall of Marvel, beginning with Goofy donning Thor’s suit, the release of an X-Men edition of High School Musical(and with shame I must confess I would watch the hell out of that movie), and Mickey Mouse stealing Wolverine’s claws and taking Spider-Man away for execution. In the end, there would only be blood.

“Thus sayeth the Lord God of Isreal: Let my Spider-Man go!”

In the years since, we have witnessed Hell. We wept at the theaters as we watched Iron Man 2, then Captain America:The First Avenger, then Thor, then The Avengers, and recently we cried a river of blood as we purchased our tickets to see Iron Man 3. In the comics, where we expected to see Ariel fighting Namor for control of Atlantis and Pocahontas joining the Avengers to battle colonial invaders, our visions came true in the form of some of the best comics we’ve seen from Marvel in years.

The worst thing to ever happen to humanity, courtesy of Disney

Now, to get to the point of Disney’s recent atrocity(since I’m sure some of you can no longer tolerate my sarcasm rant). Disney has just announced that November 7th of 2014, they will be releasing an animated movie based off of the obscure Marvel comic, Big Hero 6. For those of you unfamiliar with Big Hero 6(which is almost all of us, including me until about an hour ago), Big Hero 6 is a Japanese-based superteam composed from the usual elements of samurai, magical girls, godzilla-like monsters, and giant robots piloted by children. Big Hero 6 was a tongue-in-cheek homage/parody of the major trends in anime, and has gone on to become a cult hit.

Also, there was a Japanese X-Man(in the center) with nuclear powers for the sake of irony.

Now this seems unusual for Disney to want to adapt such a low profile series into an expensive major movie. Some theorize that Disney sees this as an opportunity to take liberties and create a solid, contained story without being weighed down by a long history and an enormous fanbase like other Marvel properties. True to this, Disney has provided some rough ideas towards the fresh premise they are presenting with Big Hero 6.

In the Walt Disney Animation studios production of Big Hero 6, the story focuses on Hiro Hamada, who works with his robot best friend Baymax and a team of reluctant first time crime fighters to save their city from scary, as-of-yet unidentified evil.

The most interesting announcement was the choice of location. Torn between keeping the setting in Japan, and bringing it to America(likely to have non-Japanese characters) , Disney decided to go with Jameripan. In Disney’s announcement, the story will be set in the fictional city of San Fransokyo, a bay-side city of rolling hills, cable cars, and traditional Japanese style architecture mixed in with high-tech skyscrapers. If you need an idea of how awesome this will look, first take a look at their redesign of the Golden Gate Bridge. Then look at this test footage:

I think the best way to end this article is to advise you to watch that test footage over and over. I’ll shut up now…